by Jeff Love
Although many of Kojève’s later writings have now been published, with the conspicuous exception of a large (900-page) manuscript written in Russian in late 1940 and the spring of 1941, it is by no means clear that Kojève wanted them to be published. The only major text he prepared for publication in his lifetime was the first volume of the Attempt. Hence, it seems important to confront the question of the authority to be granted these later, largely unpublished texts.
Kojève died suddenly. He did not leave extensive instruction about the publication of these texts, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to discern any firm intention on Kojève’s part to have them published. Given the derisive attitude expressed by Kojève in regard to Raymond Queneau’s interest in the publication of the Attempt, one might assume that Kojève preferred that his writings not see the light of day.3 If this is indeed the case, then it should behoove us to exercise caution in examining those works that remained unpublished at the time of Kojève’s death—with the exception of the Attempt, where we at least have a clearer intention to publish.
We certainly do not want to affirm Martin Heidegger’s extraordinary attitude toward Friedrich Nietzsche, in his view of the Nachlass as the repository of Nietzsche’s genuine thought.4 Heidegger indicates, in a highly self-referential way, that the thinker holds back his genuine thoughts, merely permitting a glimpse of them (at best) in the published works. Heidegger suggests that a thinker’s genuine thought should be reserved for the few capable of grasping that thought in the appropriate manner, a claim that also seems important to one of Kojève’s friends, Leo Strauss. The so-called Straussian school is notorious for its open embrace of a “closed” or “hidden” teaching, an irony only some of Strauss’s acolytes address directly. For Strauss, every philosopher worthy of the name has a hidden or esoteric teaching. The reason for hiding this teaching is that it is inherently dangerous to the city or society, since the philosopher is the one who thinks beyond the city.
Kojève is hardly sanguine about these kinds of philosophical fantasies, a point he clarifies both in his essay “Tyranny and Wisdom” and in his short essay on Emperor Julian.5 Kojève is refreshingly free of the philosophical cant one finds in Heidegger and Strauss. On the contrary, Kojève pokes fun at both by suggesting that the cloistered philosopher is more a madman than a threat to the city, more ridiculous than dangerous.6 The truly dangerous philosopher is the one who advocates action and does so with an open pedagogy that attracts not merely the few but also the many. For Kojève, all teaching for the few has the signal defect of its exclusivity. Instead, the philosopher reaches out to the many, seeking to universalize his teaching as the only confirmation of its merit. A teaching incapable of support from the many, if not from all, is simply ridiculous, a private teaching that prefers to consider itself superior, or for the few, rather than to recognize that its lack of success as a teaching for the many may signify nothing more dramatic than its fundamental inadequacy.
As a result, it seems to me wholly inappropriate to regard Kojève’s unpublished work as a privileged esoteric teaching. Indeed, the fact that Kojève published so little in his lifetime points to a far more ambiguous attitude toward philosophy than either Heidegger or Strauss could ever have countenanced. As Kojève notes in his letter to Strauss about Queneau’s proposal, he is careful lest he take himself too seriously. One might even argue, as another of Kojève’s students does, that Kojève was essentially dissatisfied with his philosophic efforts and failed to publish them on that account alone. According to this view, Kojève was aware that he was not on the same level as the philosopher whom he aspired to supplant, Hegel, and despaired of his role as commentator.7 This sounds like dubious speculation, and I would suggest that Kojève’s reticence about publication has much more to do with his ambiguous relation to philosophy than with any lack of ability.
This ambiguity emerges in Kojève’s notorious irony. While this irony certainly has to do with Kojève’s claim that we are at the end of history, it seems to have as much to do with Kojève’s general misgivings about philosophy. Those misgivings appear in his attack against philosophical esotericism, but they also are evident in his radical change in career. In the only interview he ever gave, to the journalist Gilles Lapouge, in 1968, Kojève delights in mocking the philosopher, claiming that bureaucracy is the more noble game. As we noted in the introduction, the notion of a radical change in thinking has been associated with no less than three major philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger, Georg Lukács, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But none of those thinkers took the radically different course that Kojève took. Kojève’s transformation recalls—ironically, of course—the most famous nineteenth-century Russian transformation—that of Leo Tolstoy. Kojève’s transformation resembles Tolstoy’s insofar as Kojève could not cease to engage in philosophy while mocking philosophy. Moreover, Kojève turns to bureaucracy as the proper way to bring about a new society and therewith an end to philosophy.
Though it is prima facie outlandish to think of Kojève’s becoming a bureaucrat as a sort of conversion comparable to Tolstoy’s, there seems to me little question that Kojève viewed his turn to bureaucracy as an ironic or parodic conversion narrative with the same intent as most conversion narratives: to bring about a new (and final) world. In this respect—and typically—Kojève’s ironic response to Lapouge reveals what seems also a serious project, for the end of philosophy resembles the bureaucratic state to the extent that all fundamental puzzles have been resolved; what remains is to promulgate and compel compliance with rules.
Given the complexity and ambiguity of Kojève’s attitude toward philosophy in the postwar period, it seems wise to regard the unpublished writings with caution, not as containing a genuine or secret teaching but, on the contrary, as revealing both the necessity of and the difficulty inherent in attempting to say that final or last word. These writings, then, are an ambiguous coda riven with tensions that Kojève seems to have been unable to resolve to his satisfaction. They may thus be construed as works that, in declaring it, undercut his claim for finality and, in this respect, reflect the ambivalent attitude to the end that we have already discussed at length.
The following examination of these works focuses for the most part on two primary writings: Outline of a Phenomenology of Right (1943/1981) and Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy (1968–1973; including Kojève’s book on Immanuel Kant, which supposedly belongs to the Attempt). While I give an account of some other unpublished writings, I am of the view that these two works present the clearest and most original development of the Hegel lectures insofar as the Outline describes the order of the universal and homogenous state and the Attempt articulates in immense detail the central discussion of the relation of the concept to time that we have already recognized as a key aspect of the Hegel lectures.
While these two works seem to complement each other, one providing a “phenomenological” account of the postpolitical order in the postrevolutionary final state, the other setting out in great detail the philosophical basis for the achievement of that final state, there seems to be an odd tension between them as well. The tension is interesting precisely with regard to the prospect for finality. The Outline describes the basis for a final order that admits that the universal and homogeneous state is a “limit case,” something akin to a regulative ideal in the Kantian sense.8 The Attempt, on the contrary, seems at pains to assure us that the final state has already been reached. In this respect, the Attempt seems merely to extend a given set of arguments from the Hegel lectures, specifically those dealing with the equation of time and the concept, while the Outline stakes out its own territory and, as such, is an unusual work in the context of the Kojèvian corpus as a whole.
As I have already suggested, the very uncertainty about finality that the existence of these two volumes reveals points to a remarkable oscillation in Kojève’s thought. Kojève offers a radical view of finality in the Hegel lectures that seems to be controverted
by the Outline and ironized by the Attempt. If the underlying conviction in Kojève’s thinking is the overcoming of the animal in the Aristotelian animal rationale, the ways of reaching this final end seem more plural than one might assume from a reading of the Hegel lectures alone. Indeed, as Kojève famously remarks in a letter to Leo Strauss:
Historical action necessarily leads to a specific result (hence: deduction), but the ways that lead to this result, are varied (all roads lead to Rome!). The choice between these ways is free, and this choice determines the content of the speeches about the action and the meaning of the result. In other words: materially
This extraordinary comment makes two fundamental suggestions. First, that the end is not in question—“All roads lead to Rome!”—which, as we know, is hardly an innocent phrase but rather one that carries with it the entire semantic content of the final state, that “eternal state” or “city of God,” which it is the essence of human history to achieve and for which the precondition to achievement has been met in the philosophy of Hegel. Second, that the way to this end state is not yet certain in the sense that the particular narrative has not yet become fully clear.
Let me explain this latter notion somewhat more carefully. Kojève indicates not that the road, as a factual matter, will be different but that the account of that road may be different depending on whether the United States or the Soviet Union ends up as the victorious entity that will submerge itself in the end state. In this respect, as I have noted before, the United States and the Soviet Union are, for Kojève, “metaphysically the same,” though the language that each side uses is different. Both envision an essentially hegemonic bourgeois freedom that the end state will somehow transform into the profound freedom from the animal that remains the deepest postulate of Kojève’s antibourgeois notion of freedom.
In this light, we may suggest that both the Outline and the Attempt represent different roads to the end state and that the tension between them has more to do with the modality of presentation than with the ultimate consequences they both presuppose. The greater difference, then, is between these later presentations of the final or end state and that presented in the Hegel lectures, including, of course, the note added in 1962, discussed in chapter 7. For the dire apocalyptic visions outlined in the Hegel lectures and the vision of the ritualized state are not at all evident in either the Outline or the Attempt. There may be a number of reasons for this difference, some of which I will discuss in chapter 9. It may suffice for the moment to argue that the Hegel lectures present a uniquely radical vision—perhaps the most comprehensive vision Kojève provided—whereas the later works, with all hesitation and irony taken into account, present those roads to the final Rome in a manner that shows itself to be yet another rhetorical road to the final state, avoiding the extremity of the Hegel lectures while hewing to their basic intent: the eventual overcoming of the individual, the animal self. In this sense, both these later works act as introductions to the final state.
THE UNIVERSAL AND HOMOGENEOUS STATE
Kojève’s most significant work addressing the universal and homogeneous state, the proper post-historical society, is Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, written in 1943 but published only in 1981, at the insistence of Raymond Aron. If one sticks with the Hegelian model, as Kojève bids us to, by the title alone, this long text (586 pages in the current French edition) assumes a function for Kojève similar to Hegel’s Elements of a Philosophy of Right as the most explicitly political of Kojève’s texts. In it, Kojève offers an overview of the basic structures that pertain to the universal and homogeneous state as legal structures or as structures of what Kojève refers to as droit or Recht (right). Still, though the function and main concerns may be similar, this treatise, as I have noted, has relatively little else in common with Hegel’s in terms of its specific content and structure.
Now, the first question that may come to mind is hardly superfluous: Why would one need a text such as this in the post-historical state, the universal and homogenous state? If the human being, meaning the “free, historical individual,” is to disappear in the new trans-individual reality of the post-historical state, why take the pains Kojève does to sketch out what amounts to a basic set of constitutional guidelines for this state? Would not the end of history lead to the abolition of the legal regime as such? If we have truly overcome individuality, then what sorts of offenses would even be possible? To put the issue more bluntly, if the post-historical state corrects the error that is the human on its way to overcoming itself, why would one need a regulatory system whose primary task is to maintain standards of correctness?
The obvious (but not necessarily correct) answer has to be that the Outline performs a function that is similar or complementary to that performed by the lectures included in the Introduction (whose publication was not even contemplated in 1943, when Kojève was writing the Outline). The Outline is in this sense another introduction to the final state or a transitional vision of the final state that must be implemented by political action. Like the Introduction, the Outline appears to be a work of philosophical propaganda or pedagogy, though of a more immediately practical order than the Introduction. Perhaps for this reason—and this reason alone—Perry Anderson refers to it as a more important work than the Introduction.10
This surmise is supported by the structure of the book itself, in which the second of its three main parts lays out a deft summary of the master-slave relation that is so central to the Introduction.11 Unlike the later published version of the Introduction, however, this summary comes only in the middle of the text, after Kojève has completed an elaborate discussion of the basic components of what he calls “right.” The emphasis in the Outline is clearly on elaborating a system of right, with the development narrative having a less fundamental role.
This system of right resembles a calculus or “logic” of action. It is the correlate or companion, as I have noted, to the Attempt, which develops the Hegelian notion of the concept to its fullest extent. Like that treatise, we may assume that the Outline plays the role of an introduction to the universal and homogeneous state, made necessary by the fact that this state has not yet been fully realized (or may indeed not be capable of full realization). While I do not intend to examine the Outline in detail as a major legal work in its own right, it is at least important, as an introduction to Kojève’s later work, to present an account of the main features of it as a significant component of Kojève’s philosophical enterprise, for the Outline is concerned with right in a very interesting way, as the essential calculus of action promoting the postpolitical, super-, or end state.12
The juridical system proposed by Kojève is thus explicitly hegemonic. It permits no remainder of custom or justice external to the system of right it proposes. It is universalist and final or, at the very least, points to a final system of regulation in the universal and homogeneous state.13 Hence, the system of right that undergirds this state will no longer be merely one system of right among others but almost a sort of surrogate “instinct” or “program” regulating all individuals completely and finally.
To this end, the central thrust of the treatise is its establishment of an extensive adjudicative apparatus, akin to what Carl Schmitt describes in his major text on Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.14 We might say that Kojève writes the formal, legal groundwork for the Stalinist state, or for a state that considerably exceeds the
Stalinist state in its totalizing tendency, since no one person can take a position of primacy.
The first section of the treatise sets out a very abstract formal or “phenomenological” account of the basic structural unit that ties the entire treatise together: the “juridical situation,” which is a strictly formal relation between three parties—two agents in potential conflict with each other (A and B), and a third, intervening figure (C) that seeks both to police and to adjudicate any possible conflicts. Kojève indicates clearly that this relation is not an abstraction, but he refers to it nonetheless as the simplest possible relation that may give rise to intervention or adjudication by the third, C. The essential details of the juridical situation are fairly straightforward. For a juridical situation to arise, A must have a right vis-à-vis another, represented by B. “Right” describes the authority or responsibility to do or to refrain from doing an action. A has a right; B infringes that right. A acts or does not act; B reacts so as to cancel A’s act or omission. C intervenes the moment that A’s right has been infringed. C either simply stops the infringement or adjudicates or both.
There is no juridical situation when there are only two parties involved (the minimum for any relation whatsoever), simply because there is no possibility for adjudication.15 This apparently straightforward point merits more careful consideration.
Adjudication is the crucial notion underlying the entire treatise. Adjudication presupposes a conflict with an assumed procedure for its resolution, the essence of right. In a conflict with only two parties, there can be no assumed procedure of resolution; indeed, the assumed procedure for resolution is, according to Kojève, the trajectory of history itself as the history of the master-slave dialectic. Therefore, a resolution procedure or right is only possible at or near the end of history, when the basically dyadic conflict between master and slave has come to a conclusion. Hitherto there is no genuine adjudication, only conflict, and a necessarily partial approach to the question of adjudication in the sense that the criteria for adjudication reflect the interests of one or the other of the parties to the conflict, either A or B.